Carnegie Mellon University has been given the use of The Sims by Electronic Arts for its next version of Alice, a programming environment designed for beginning students. Alice is already used in hundreds of schools nationwide as an easy, user-friendly way of getting students into programming. It introduces concepts such as objects, inheretence, and polymorphism in a way that is a little easier to get started with than being thrown into the waters with C++.
The number of new students entering computer science programs is on the decline, and tools like this (used in high schools as well as colleges) can only help. Of course, it's probably the influence on the US-based job market for software developers by India and China that has had the most affect here.
Posted by scottsh at Sunday March 12, 2006 - 7:25 PM | TrackBack (0) | Category: PC Games | © 2006 Gaming Signal